Mayor of Worcester Blog

For my next fundraising event as Mayor of Worcester, the Mayoress and I will be hosting a Charity Fashion Show at the Guildhall on Thursday 14 March, in aid of my chosen charity Age UK Worcester and Malvern Hills.

Alongside Age UK, I am working with students from Christopher Whitehead Language College, Nunnery Wood High School and Heart of Worcestershire College to make this a sustainability-themed fashion show, It will feature up-cycled clothes and accessories that will be produced and modelled by the students.

The clothes have been donated by staff and parents from the participating schools, and also by local businesses and their employees. The students will re-imagine the items to create a variety of outfits for different occasions – and to help them, they have been given free access to Age UK’s charity shops so that they can choose items to accessorise their collections.

The event will be held in the Guildhall’s spectacular Assembly Room. It will include a drinks reception with canapés, a two-course dinner and entertainment from a string quartet, plus performances by some of the very talented students.

Following the fashion show itself, each outfit will be offered at auction for guests to bid on and there will be a further auction and raffle of items that  have been very kindly donated by local residents and businesses to raise further funds for Age UK.

I would like to thank everyone who has already generously contributed to this event.

For further information about the Charity Fashion Show and to obtain tickets, please email civicoffice@worcester.gov.uk.

It’s so easy, perhaps natural, to want to turn away from uncomfortable issues but as the Harvard philosopher Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

This week, together with the Worcestershire Interfaith Forum, I hosted the annual International Holocaust Memorial Day event at the Guildhall.

The theme of this year’s Memorial Day was the ‘Fragility of Freedom’, summed up by these lines from an entry in Anne Frank’s Diary, reflecting on May 1940 when the Germans arrived in the Netherlands: “That is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees.”

This year the keynote speaker was Mr Michael Bibring, a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Michael’s father Harry left Vienna for Britain on the Kindertransport as a 13-year-old, along with his sister. The plan was for their parents to later join them, but that never happened, with his father dying of a heart attack in 1940 and his mother being deported to the death camp at Sobibór in Poland in 1942.

I found Michael to be an inspirational speaker – he laid out very clearly that the Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers, it started with decrees, that Jews had to mark themselves out by wearing a yellow star, that their children had to go to different schools. Over time the decrees went further prohibiting them from using the municipal swimming pool and the imposition of a nighttime curfew, and so on, creating an increasingly intolerable hostile environment that led to the ghettos and once they had the gas chambers ready, the mass murder of the Jews, gay men, gypsies and those with disabilities.

But how did that happen, why did people go along with this? The truth is that those decrees were built on even earlier dehumanising language and ‘othering’. So here is, perhaps an uncomfortable, challenge for all of us. Will you refuse to turn away, will you remember what happened in the Holocaust and will you call out people when you hear them using dehumanising language?

 

 

As Mayor you get to learn about the many and varied parts of Worcester’s varied cultures. I recently attended the Malayali Christmas celebrations that happen in January each year. It was a riot of sarees, food, music and dance with an amazing Father Christmas throwing sweets and dancing his way through a cheering crowd.

There are over a thousand Malayali families living in Worcestershire who originally came from Kerela in southwest India. Due to their good English and medical training many of these families came to the UK in the 90s and noughties to work in our NHS and as consequence we have lots of Malayali residents living here in Worcester, many working at Worcestershire Royal Hospital.

It’s perhaps dangerous to generalise but the Malayali community are generous to a fault and are a friendly and an incredibly polite group of people. In fact, unless you have been a patient at the hospital you may not have known that the community existed.

A big part of their culture is that they are mostly Catholic, the other for me was to learn that they are very keen on tug of war competitions. Our Worcester team is very good – in the past they have been UK national champions and they sometimes travel abroad to compete. Tug of war is a popular sport in southeast Asia – you don’t need a big space and the only equipment you need is a rope. It’s a very competitive sport – it’s not just strength or weight it’s about timing, technique and teamwork. There is lots of talk about getting just the right type of shoe for getting the best grip.

 

I know that local councillors are working with council staff to try and find a place for the local team to practice. It would be fantastic to see tug of war given more attention in Worcester and I’m sure that if the council can support the community with a space to practice it will be possible to see this great sport taken up by all sections of the community.

 

Last week I met with several members of SpeakEasy N.O.W. during their visit to the Guildhall.

SpeakEasy celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2022. The group was created to give people with a learning disability the opportunity to speak up about things that make life difficult for them and to flag the things that need to change. It brings together people from across the county to gather views and opinions and to bring these issues to the attention of the local authority.

Like many third sector organisations, they often fill service gaps that used to be provided by statutory organisations. Despite financial constraints SpeakEasy continues to run a network of Speak Up groups across Worcestershire, these feed into monthly Forum meetings and various project groups such as Health Checkers and the People’s Parliament. To their credit they lead by example and maintain their user-led philosophy with a management committee comprised entirely of their members and a Board of Trustees which includes people with a learning disability.

By supporting people to speak up they achieve many things:

• increasing people’s confidence and self- esteem, giving people a sense of purpose and recognising the individual value that each of them has to offer.
• they help people develop knowledge and skills that can lead to paid employment.
• they offer paid roles within their own organisation for people with a learning disability
• they provide opportunities for social networking, helping people to develop and maintain friendships and receive peer support. This helps address the loneliness and isolation that affects many people with disabilities.
•  they provide accessible information on a huge variety of topics including maintaining physical and mental health, managing finances, keeping safe and accessing their communities.

SpeakEasy provide both learning disability awareness training and an Easy Read service to help organisations become more accessible and improve the quality of services they deliver. More information can be found on their website at www.speakeasynow.org.uk